"I'm a cowardly sort of chap. When I feel like calling you, I choke it down. I don't want to get the habit of you." "Why not?" "One reason--it will be so difficult when you go away." A sense of freedom and happiness possessed her. Words rose tumultuously to her lips, to be choked there. She wanted to say unreasonably, "I shall never go away. How could you think it?" But instead she asked, with a happy indirection, "Where am I going?" He, too, answered lightly,-- "How should I know? Back into your cloud, I guess--dear goddess." The last words were very low, and to himself, but she heard them. Instantly and against all reason, she, who had never meant to be happy again, laughed ecstatically. "Think," she said, "a month ago I didn't know you were in the world." "Oh, yes, you did. Peter told you he had a kind of a brother, that worked on the farm. But I didn't know you were in the world." "Of course," she deliberated softly, "I knew Peter had a brother. But I didn't know it was you." The moonlit air was as beguiling to him as it was to her. Everything was different and everything was possible. He put his hand to his head and tried to recall old prudences. In vain. The still, bright world told him, with a voice so quiet that it was like a hand upon his heart, that it was the only world. The daylight one of doubts and dull expediency had been arranged by man. This was the home of the spirit. For a moment he felt himself drowning in that sea of life. Then, perhaps lifted by his striving will, he seemed to come out again to the free air that had touched him at her coming. Again he was at peace and incredibly exalted. He tried to bring lightness into their talk. "I suppose," said he, "you are one of the charmers." "What do you mean by charmers?" "Don't ask me what I mean, when you know. If you do that, we shall forget our language." "What do you mean by our language?" "Yours and mine. Don't you hear it going on, question and answer, question and answer, all the time our tongues are talking? Those are the things we never can speak out loud." "Yes, I hear them. But I couldn't tell what I hear." "Of course you couldn't. Only when we really speak with our lips, we must tell each other the truth. If we don't, we shall jar things. Then the other voices will stop." When she spoke her words had a note of pain, mysteriously disproportioned, he thought, to the warning he had given. "I don't think I have told you what wasn't true," she faltered. Life had gone out of her. The tenderest comforting seemed to him too harsh for such pathetic sorrow. But he clung to his lighter, safer mood. "We've simply got to tell each other the truth. When we don't, it's like the clanging of ten thousand bells. Of course that drowns the other voices. So when I ask you if you are one of the charmers, you mustn't ask what I mean. You must answer." She began to laugh. His heart rejoiced at it. "Yes," she owned gleefully. "Yes, I am."